The New Flyer factory acknowledged a major order to build 140 diesel electric hybrid buses in St. Cloud — work that was supposed to begin this week — has been postponed indefinitely.

The CEO said the customer (didn’t say which customer) planned to buy the buses using only state (didn’t say which state) money because federal stimulus money available to buy the buses wasparceled out to other capital projects. The customer is seeking state funds but doesn’t know when that will come, so the order’s been postponed.

Ordinarily, this is not a huge deal. Companies cancel orders all the time. New Flyer says the $122 million order represented only about three percent of its total order backlog.

…because of the recession, local governments are having trouble and that’s why the Recovery Act is providing the help to local governments, including $8 billion specifically to local governments to fund their mass transit systems. In other words, to buy the buses that you’re gonna make.

New Flyer says it has received orders from cities including Philadelphia, Chicago and Milwaukee to buy buses fully or partially with stimulus funds. So it’s not like money isn’t flowing.

But as MPR and ProPublica have reported the past couple weeks, the stimulus package isn’t as stimulating as people in St. Cloud expected.

We’ve been asking citizens in our Public Insight Network about their expectations for the stimulus. Most of the 40 or so folks who’ve responded expected some benefit didn’t think it would help tremendously.

Dan Hauck of Cedar, MN, thought it would hurt the economy ultimately. “It will affect me and my kids by putting an incredibly large debt on all tax payers for many years,” he wrote us.

So what is the right way to think about the stimulus? If it does something to get us out of the economy is that enough? Even if it comes up short of expectations in places like St. Cloud?